Is Suicide-by-Cop a New Service Offered by Law Enforcement?

How Should Police Respond to Mental Health Crisis Calls?
Photo: Cindy Hill

The 'other' St. Louis-area police shooting of this past summer involved the death of 25-year-old Kajieme Powell about 15 seconds after two city law enforcement officers reached the curb in their cruiser. The cops were responding to two 9-1-1 calls--one indicating that Powell had stolen a couple of sodas from a mini-mart, the other indicating that Powell had a knife in his pocket and was acting strangely.

One remarkable thing about this incident is that it was recorded on cell-phone video from start to finish. That video has been removed from YouTube because of its grisly content (the shooting and death was an order of magnitude more subtle than the average tv and movie shooting incident, but there's something about its actual realness that turns blood to ice), but it is still available embedded in many online news articles.

Race, socioeonomic status, age, environment, and the presence of a small knife in Powell's hand might all have played a role in the officers' decision to exit their vehicle with guns drawn, hesitate for a swift couple of seconds in which Powell took the last steps of his life -- first away from, then, jumping up on a low concrete dividing wall, down a driveway ramp towards the police -- then open fire.

But the factor which overwhelmingly tipped the scales towards the irreversible termination of this young man's life was the fact that he loudly, repeatedly, authoritatively, commanded the officers to "Shoot Me. Shoot Me Now.  Shoot Me."  To viewers of the videotape, this fatal monologue was foreshadowed by Powell placing the soda cans on the sidewalk just a few seconds earlier, muttering something suggesting that he was going to be laying there himself.

Mr. Powell committed suicide-by-cop.  He's hardly unique in this. Examples abound in every corner of the country, including representational instances here in Vermont.  Mass shootings at schools and workplaces tend to be variations on this theme in which the individual is not content to steal sodas then walk up to the two responding police officers and ask to be shot, like Mr. Powell did, but rather help to guarantee the end result by a more flamboyant blaze-of-glory incident just to be sure no one stands around saying, 'Gee, do you think we should taze him instead of blowing his head off?'

So, when a guy wants someone to shoot him, should we send the police out to oblige?

The question is just the tip of the iceberg of a discussion we are all not having about the huge and growing role of law enforcement, courts and jails as 'solutions' to mental, and sometimes physical, health crises. The 1989 U.S.Supreme Court decision that guides prosecutors, grand juries, and juries in determining whether to charge or convict a police officer of excessive use of force is particularly interesting because it involved a man who was suffering from an episode of low blood sugar related to diabetes.  It is not uncommon for individuals suffering from diabetes, epilepsy, or other physical health conditions including medication conflicts or withdrawals, to run into confrontations with law enforcement officials, often ending up at the receiving end of considerable force or restraint -- sometimes even death.  Often individuals experiencing such events can not hear, or can not respond to, officer instructions to stop or kneel or drop what is in their hands.  Sometimes they may be flailing or cursing as part of the pattern that precedes a seizure or blackout.

The standard set by the U.S. Supreme Court requires prosecutors, grand juries and juries to consider what a reasonable police officer, in light of their knowledge, training and concern for other members of the community, would do if faced with exactly the same circumstances. If the person is acting strangely, appearing agitated, does not respond to commands, then by law a level of force, up to and including deadly force, can be legally used to subdue that individual.

With a steeply increasing percentage of our population taking pharmaceuticals for mental health issues -- anxiety, depression, ADD -- these conflicts and their often deadly results seem to be getting all the more common.  We are faced with a disconnect between the law of what the police CAN do -- what they are legally authorized to do -- and the ethics of what they SHOULD do.  Just because you are allowed to do something legally doesn't mean you necessarily should assume it's the right thing to do. And yet, how do we go about training police officers to follow established protocols for community safety on the one hand, yet exercise the ethics of discretion on the other?

Much is made today of our high incarceration rate, but a hundred years ago, we had the same percentage of our population locked in institutions. The difference is that a hundred years ago, 80% of that institutionalized population was in mental hospitals, and 20% in jails. Today those percentages are more than inverted.

In the days of those big scary mental institutions, there was another response option to the person 'acting strangely' or threatening suicide -- the men in the white coats with straight jackets. When we as a society collectively determined that large mental institutions and those guys with the straight jackets were inhumane, we did not create any alternative to take their place.  (I'll refrain from making a comment here about how the US likes to throw over foreign tyrants without having any idea what to put in their place, either. But, it's about the same thing.) You can call an ambulance -- but if the person is bouncing around or swinging or throwing things, the ambulance personnel will ask for police back-up. There's no other choice. There's no middle ground.

Even the legal standard itself is highly subjective. There is no checklist, there is no explicit court ruling that lists precise actions or timelines required; instead, prosecutors, grand jurors and jurors have to compare the standard to the facts and determine if the officer's actions were legally warranted by the circumstances.  In some cases the answer is clear: the armed robbery in progress, the person holding a hostage at gunpoint, and similar situations where lives are in immediate danger. Most policing cases are not blessed with that kind of clarity.

John Odum recently proposed that we militarize the police, by which he meant that we should urge greater standardization of police responses. The problem with attempting to do so is that the myriad of mental health crises to which police get called can not be put into the boxes of a checklist rubric. Let's say we accept as a rule that police can shoot 25 year old black men holding a pocketknife and saying 'Shoot Me.' Do you also shoot the 89 year old wheelchair bound woman in a nursing home who is throwing her food tray and yelling 'Shoot Me'? How about the 13 year old girl sitting in her basement cutting herself with a broken bottle after being harassed at school, while muttering 'Shoot Me'?  Can we come up with a standardized response -- that police should always execute such individuals, or perhaps that they should never do so?

Or, instead of arm-wrestling over police protocols, do we find some approach other than sending police to mental health crises calls? I'm not suggesting that we return to the nightmare of ghost-filled psychiatric institutions and those guys who are coming to take you away -- but I am suggesting that if we truly want our police responding to mental and physical health crises, we better make that clear and provide them with considerably more appropriate training on the subject, or that we supplement that response with adequate crisis intervention resources.

In the video of Powell's death, one individual in the crowd of onlookers--just one-- attempts to engage in conversation and divert the situation, shouting out an admonition that this isn't the way to do it. That lone voice was the only attempt made to address Powell's painful circumstances and turn them into something other than just another suicide-by-cop.  That lone voice was right -- this isn't the way to do it.

--Cindy Hill